C is for Carrion Crawler

We've had some debate over whether we should include creatures with more than one word in their name. After all, B may stand for "Brain", but it doesn't stand for "Mole". In this case, we've got two Cs, so we're both happy.

Carrion Crawlers are horrible worms that feed on the dead and lay their eggs inside corpses. They're also efficient hunters of the living, using tentacles coated in paralysing gum to subdue their enemies. Interestingly, the 1st Edition crawlers don't have a bite attack, and their poison doesn't actually deal damage. In fact, they don't even appear to have mouths. This is a million times creepier. I imagine their paralysing attacks are completely unfelt, anaesthetising the nerves instantly, like the bite of a leech. Once they've subdued their prey, maybe they lay their eggs inside the still living bodies? This is probably painless too. In fact, once those hatchlings start to feed, I don't imagine you'd feel that either...

Later editions added mouths (fair enough), and fangs (which seem wrong to me). Now they look a little silly, much like the cute pair above. Aw, bless!

Draw Vecna Day

My computer kindly informs me that today is "Draw Vecna" day. At least, it is according to Twitter. Some talented bloggers have joined in, including James Stowe, whose work I greatly admire. In the spirit of this holiday, now seems an appropriate time to share Stacey's interpretation of the "Father of Lies". Unfortunately we're not on Twitter, so we can't really join the party. Looks like it's just you and me.

Funnily enough, Vecna plays a pivotal role in our campaign right now. After months of hiding his eponymous hand under a glove, the last session saw our ranger tragically cut down, just as he'd found a way to rid himself of the curse. I called things to a halt just as the glove was torn from Vecna's still twitching hand, exposing the treachery to the whole party. Amongst them was our cleric of Ioun, who isn't likely to appreciate the news. It was, as we like to say in England, "a real Eastenders ending".

I've also been having fun with Vecna's backstory. Since the start of the adventure, the ranger has been carrying a magical lantern haunted by a beautiful ghost girl. Over time, the two have fallen in love (he himself is a Revenant; the "Ghostmaster" of the haunted town of Hammerfast). The girl has little memory of life, knowing only that her father killed her. So far, we've had two more Eastenders moments based on this: the first being the revelation that her father is actually Vecna, and the second being the discovery that he used her body as his own phylactery. Kind of twisted, but hey, it's Vecna.

I also made the lantern useful in its own right. These last few months I've been bringing lots of homebrew items into the campaign, some of which I may share here one day. For now, here's the lantern. Thanks to Tjaart for the picture - and I promise we'll find some cool way of bringing your character back!

B is for Bullywug

Bullywugs are a warlike race of bipedal, swamp-dwelling frog things. They live in disharmony with their environment, often overfishing or outstripping their hunting grounds until their whole tribe is forced to move on or starve to death. Such debauched behaviour is taken a step further in 4th Edition: now their very presence warps and pollutes their homeland, perverting it into a "dismal echo" of what it once was. In a stroke of off-kilter design genius, killing a bullywug actually causes you to regain hit points, as though the land itself were thanking you! Sadly, such blessings are entirely out of whack with their cute, Kermit the Frog appearance.

Group Templates

The Yellow Banner doing what it does best - bringing the thunder!

"The maths is broken". It's a common complaint heard on the message boards - monsters from the first two Monster Manuals don't pack enough punch, especially at high levels. Wizards of the Coast consequently errata'd their official rules on monster creation, lowering defences and upping damage across the board. But was it really needed?

Yes, it was. In fact, I'd say it doesn't go far enough. True, damage for paragon and epic tier monsters wasn't high enough - but I think that's only half the problem. What encounter groups still lack at higher levels are power synergies and "gotcha!" powers.

Take my group. Every encounter, there are no less than three interrupting powers they can use to screw with an enemy attack. The ranger can make a disruptive strike, dealing damage to the monster and imposing a penalty to its hit roll. The battlemind can perform a lightning rush, gaining a free attack and taking the blow if he hits. The paladin can use guardian's counter, swapping places with the target, taking the hit himself, and then gaining a free counter-attack. Potentially, all three could even be used on the same attack. These are what I call "gotcha!" powers:

Me: "Lord Fatbeard laughs cruelly as he closes on the wizard. He raises his mace and..."
Tjaart: "Disruptive strike. Hits 37 AC. 24 damage, -6 to hit."
Me: "...damn."

In my opinion, the balance here is pretty screwy. As players go up levels, they gain greater and greater power variety. This versatility isn't shared by monsters - as they go up in levels, their power variety remains pretty much the same. Sure, their damage output goes up, but I don't think that's enough.

Again, take my group. Right now, we have two leaders (one dual class, one pure), but even so:

• I'm adding +10 to all pre-Monster Manual III damage.
• I frequently chain two encounters together into one.
• Two of my players are cursed, meaning that whenever one takes damage, the other gets stung for half. 

Yet I still find it difficult to challenge them.

The attached rules are designed to counter that. The basic idea is to provide a set of "group templates": special power sets that are shared between all creatures in the group. By applying one of these templates to the group, they all gain access to a special trait and a number of shared powers (mostly interrupts and reactions). At higher tiers of play, power versatility increases. I've not tested them yet - I'll be trialling them this weekend - but hopefully they'll give my encounters a bit of added punch!

See what you think:

A,B,C,D (and D)

For a while now, Stacey's had this plan to illustrate the alphabet according to D&D - the sort of thing you'd see hung on a classroom wall - with grown monsters for the upper case letters, and baby monsters for the lower case ones. The idea came from a children's illustration class she attended last year, where her tutor set the challenge of bringing letters to life. With 'Beholder Basic' gearing our thoughts towards kids, now seems an appropriate time to share the first.

Achaierais are massive, 15-foot tall flightless birds that prowl the Infernal Battlefield of Acheron. Despite their Sesame Street features, they're actually thoroughly evil, and delight in torture. They speak Infernal (in high-pitched squawking voices, I imagine), and can belch out clouds of black, maddening gas. Sounds to me like someone was smoking some of that mad gas themselves when they cooked them up.

Keep posted for "B is for...". With so many great contenders, who knows what we'll see? (one clue: it's not a Beholder).

Beholder Basic: The Cleric

"No swords or bows and arrows can be employed, for the cleric is forbidden by his religion from the drawing of blood."

For Beholder Basic, you'll see I've boiled the list of skills down to just four.

Athletics: Want to leap up onto that balcony? Hold your breath underwater? Lift that portcullis?  Then test your Athletics.
Lore: Decipher that coded message? Recognise the ancient king in that carving? Activate that magic portal? Lore. This skill encompasses Arcana, History, Nature and Religion.  
Perception: As it was. Use Perception to spot traps and secret doors, or hear that assassin sneaking up behind you.
Stealth: For when you want to sneak up behind them. Also incorporates Thievery, so you can now use Stealth to pick locks and disable traps. Basically, everything sneaky.

Of course, this means some omissions. There's no Heal - in 4E, I feel the cost of spending an action is enough, and the DCs are so low anyhow - and no Dungeoneering (who uses it anyway?). Perhaps most noticeably, all the social skills have gone: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate and Streetwise. My reasoning here is simply to encourage role-playing - get kids acting out social encounters rather than relying on dice - so I suppose that's one aspect where Beholder Basic plants its feet firmly in the Old School.

In a similar sense, Sandy and I have been having this ongoing discussion about whether or not Perception should be in the game. Rather than rolling dice, he argues that players should describe where they're searching. For instances where a roll may be preferable - such as searching for an invisible enemy - the DM just sets a DC for a flat D20 roll. I'm on the other side of the fence for now, but I may change my opinion. What do you think?

Beholder Basic

"Bruno the Battler smashes open a dungeon door and is confronted by a big goblin in chainmail armed with a scimitar."

Here's something silly I've been working on. What if there was a bone-simple version of 4th Edition that kids could play? That slaughtered some of the sacred cows - like ability scores - and shamelessly hard-wired collectible fortune cards and tokens into the core? And what if - just for the hell of it (or perhaps in protest against all this "back to basics" stuff flying about) - we kit-bashed this monster into the oldest edition of D&D available: the original D&D Basic Set?

You see, the other day I discovered that I own the "Holmes Edition" of D&D: one of the original boxed sets, printed in 1978. I've never actually played it - I was three years old at the time of release, so the best I could've done was chew on it - but reading it now is quite an eye-opener. I cut my teeth on the red box, published almost ten years after the original pamphlets, and I think it's fair to say they'd tidied things up by that stage. In comparison, Holmes sounds like it was written by a madman. Still, despite its scatter-shot approach to layout and tone, it's not without charm. In particular, reading this edition shows me that some of our sacred cows aren't as holy as they seem. Take races, for example. Here we find a wonderful column that suggests:

"At the Dungeon Master's discretion a character can be anything his or her player wants him to be. Characters must always start out inexperienced and relatively weak and build on their experience. Thus, an expedition might include, in addition to the four basic classes and races (human, elven, dwarven, halflingish), a centaur, a lawful werebear, and a Japanese Samurai fighting man." 

And people complain about "the circus coming to town"? Also note, "halflingish" - really quite beautiful.

Overall, reading Holmes made me wonder what I'd like from a basic set today. I've bought both the Revised Red Box and the Pathfinder Beginner Box, but in truth I think that both of them are flawed. They're trying to teach overly complex systems to an audience that's really too young to get it. Equally, I don't think the answer is to go back to Original D&D. Rules-wise, 4th Edition was a pretty lean beast, and - despite the hate - introduced some new toys to the box that I think our kids would really get on with. Power cards, for instance. I think it's a shame to throw these out in favour of graph paper and pencils. What I want - and I'm not talking 5th Edition here - is to see a basic version of 4th Edition that's somewhere between the D&D adventure boardgames and the role-playing games, but fully playable in the "old-fashioned" way; i.e. without tiles and miniatures.

The character card you see above - artwork care of Sandy! - represents what I'd work towards:

• Heavy emphasis on cards and counters, much like WFRP 3rd Edition. Players have a character card that they lay in front of them, which they use to "socket" their power cards to.
• No ability scores (the use of arrays and skills has made them obsolete in 4th Edition, in my opinion). Instead, fixed bonuses for defences, supplemented by class-specific gear cards.
• An even further boiled-down set of skills: now refined to just four. 
• Less Hit Points for an even more lethal experience.

Who knows, maybe I'll take it further, and actually write this thing up? Take that as a warning.